Here is a posting submitted by my friend Derek:
I saw this article on slashdot, which probably means a lot of you have already seen it, but I thought others that might not have seen it already would find it humorous. A suggested read if you’ve ever attended a forum with a lot of literature professors and graduate students and after about half an hour you started wondering whether anyone was really saying anything useful, or if it was all just verbose and creative b.s.
Reading this reminds me a lot of my high school literature classes, where we were always writing short essays analyzing whatever American or British work of literature we had just read. Once you figure out what the teacher likes, it becomes unbelievably easy to b.s. almost anything and still get an A. I have found that for the few literature classes I have had to take in college, that the exact same standard applies.
Still though, applying b.s. does require skill and finesse, and really is an art form all of its own. I just don’t think that it is the art form that professional teachers of literature (be they lowly high school teachers or well-respected professors) inteded it to be.